Monday, September 6, 2010

Flights of fancy

I have been reading, as I mentioned earlier, Charles deLint, and he and those like him always affect my brain. Everything does, of course, but deLint and his ilk encourage that part of me that wants to believe in simply everything. I string it all together like, like string theory actually, a theory of everything, and make it all somehow possible in my mind. The pervasiveness of faerie tales means something, perhaps, as does the pervasiveness of religion, and of so many common (commonly shared) human things. All our connections and disparities.

I think of the magic I saw and felt when I was younger, from serial dreams to inexplicable deja-vu, from a dream that left a tangible object in my hand upon waking to a hypnotism game that went around the fourth-grade schoolyard--one that worked so well I felt a painful grip around wrists that no one was touching.

It's all about lenses. It is, has to be, must be. The lens of the physical, clearly visible, immediately tangible world: if I do not eat or do not drink, I will wither and die; if I slip a hand against a blade or stub a toe on a stone, I will bleed or bruise, then heal. These things are true and visible and calculable. But so many other truths seem undeniable, even if they can be faked or mimicked in some ways, at some times: the truth of connection; the truth of mystery. The truth that beneath and above all, we and everything are all the same, made of the same things, together making up the same universe, all connected.

And the interface! The center of the science vs. mumbo-jumbo Venn diagram: that factual mystery of our ability to affect one another over distance. Explanations and counter-arguments have been offered, and the phenomenon has been repeatedly documented, scientifically and anecdotally. The energy of which I am formed can affect that which forms you. Can you believe it?

And that mysteries lie alongside and within and between, above and below everything: I love this. I love that no matter how long scientists delve and dissect and discover, they will never reach the end of knowledge. Who could ever explain the dream I had at nine years old which came true, moment for moment and word for word for three days straight, a year later? Who could ever explain the dream from which I awoke holding a tiger's eye stone that my parents didn't recognize and that I had never seen before I dreamed of it? The voice I heard calling my name one afternoon when no one was around?

But these lenses: I still stare awestruck at the extravagant, expansive beauty of the world, and I marvel at raindrops and rivers and spider's webs, but although I try (when I remember) to keep my eyes open, I stopped living magic, that storybook kind of magic, a long time ago. Today I wonder if I lost it when I began to focus more on fitting in. Is that silly? I walked around for fourteen years, give or take, feeling like an outsider, feeling like the person outside the window watching the party go by. When I got sick enough of the whole scene I started trying to learn how to build bridges to other people's hearts and minds, which was and is of course a gradual process. And gradually, I seem to have lost the magic in my dreams.

1 comment:

  1. /agree.

    I feel like I can't contribute anything meaningful right now without making my brain hurt, but I agree with much of what you're writing about here... Some things are too much of a coincidence to be coincidence, if that makes sense..

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